


Fallen, Falling

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [86]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Literal Sleeping Together, Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, Nightmares, POV Loki (Marvel), Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:14:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24815911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: Loki dreams of Thanos, sometimes, but he also dreams of falling. And yet, every time he opens his eyes, there you are.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [86]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 9
Kudos: 141





	Fallen, Falling

Falling, Fallen (Loki/Reader Lullabies #86)

More often than he would have liked to admit, Loki dreamed about falling. 

It seemed like such a mundane thing to obsess over. Of all the things that he’d seen and experienced, all the sick powerlessness that he was all too familiar with, he dreamed about _falling_? 

Make no mistake; he had plenty of nightmares about what happened _after_ he fell. He’d been torn apart and remade countless times, always trying to scream for help through a mouth that would not move. The mad titan rooted around in his mind and unearthed sick new ways to torture him. Over and over again, he was turned into a puppet for someone else’s goals—but worse than a puppet, because the goals became _his_ as well. 

When he dreamed of the titan, especially in your bed, he woke up howling. Even as he tried to gather his wits in the darkness, even as cold sweat dried against his skin, he was aware of your presence. You woke up each time, and said his name in a low voice. He hated how you had to get his attention before you’d lay a hand on him, and he knew that it was because, when you didn’t, he cringed away from you. When he let you, you would wrap yourself around him and hold him tightly and tell him over and over again that he was safe here. That no one could hurt him. That you loved him. He knew that it hurt you, the way he refused to tell you what he saw, but the idea of bringing Him into this sanctuary was ghoulish. He knew that you knew as much about Thanos as other Midgardians, but he’d die before he told you any more than that. He wanted to shield you from the things that made him sick. So it hurt him to turn you down each time you told him you would listen, but he kept doing it. He needed you to stay separate from the things he’d seen. The things he’d felt.

But when he dreamed of falling, he woke up silent and frozen. In many ways, those nightmares were worse than the others. He plummeted through space, cold and silent, while anger and frustration whirled through his head. He felt the press of space, the press of something improbably like gravity, the press of having been let down over and over and over again, and it tore him apart. He fell away from the only life he’d ever known—sickening and full of lies, but familiar nonetheless—and into a void. Into nothingness. And there was nothing he could do about it. His hands would flail out into the emptiness of space, but there was never anything to take hold of. He was alone, and he was falling, and he could scream until his throat went ragged but nothing ever happened.

He never stopped falling. There was no threat—or promise—of solid land hurtling towards him. Depending on how long the dream lasted, he sometimes longed for the release of death. His dream-self begged the universe to kill him on impact if it had to, if it meant he could be still for just a moment. But it never stopped. Instead, he woke up in your bed, beside you, and always had to catch his breath. It seemed that he did not cry out in his sleep when he had these dreams, which was sort of a mixed blessing. It meant he didn’t rouse you from the rest you so dearly needed, but it also meant that you didn’t put your steadying arms around him and promise him that he would be okay.

His younger self would have scoffed at the idea of appreciating someone like you. Even before he survived Thanos, he prided himself on never needing anyone. If you counted on someone, they could let you down. They could turn out to be someone entirely different. They could turn out to look at you with disdain. To avoid the pain of discovering who someone truly was, he kept himself isolated. And he liked it that way, for a long time.

And then he’d found you. 

At first he’d thought you were nothing. Quiet, mousy, anxious, it was easy to overlook you even when you were the only other person in the room. The only thing that had really drawn any of his attention to you was the way you hadn’t looked at him with fear. Or anger. At first, he’d thought of that as stupid. There you were, a dull Midgardian without any way to defend yourself from him if he decided to strike out at you. You didn’t even have the sense to fear him, a monster, the man who’d sought to rule your world? You couldn’t possibly have known that it wasn’t truly his own ambition, but His. For all the people of Earth knew, the Avengers had brought a villain to live with them in the Tower. But each time he caught you watching him, you gave him the slightest smile before you looked away. 

He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d sought you out once, and tested you, sort of. He’d let himself slip comfortably into the role of a villain and cornered you in your office. He heard the way your heartbeat increased, saw the way your hands fluttered in front of you, but your voice was steady as you answered each of his questions. It wasn’t fear that you felt. And when he’d backed you up against the wall behind your desk and gotten inadvisably close to you, he saw how your pupils dilated, how you wet your lips with your tongue, and he realized what it was that you actually felt.

And now here you were. Or here he was. Waking from his most common nightmare beside you, the least common Midgardian. You had nightmares of your own, he knew: stress dreams and memories of a demon who’d come before him. Sometimes it was his turn to wake you, and when he did you often pressed yourself tightly against him and hid your face in his chest. Like he could protect you from what you’d seen. That did more for his mental state than maybe anything else. 

You did a lot for him. You worked hard to work against what you saw as a horrific upbringing. You would compliment him like it was nothing more than breathing to you. You marveled over him—not just his physical form, but his mind—and, if he let you, you could go on for hours about what a miracle you thought he was. You could touch him so gently, like you were brushing your fingers along a piece of art, and there was always a deep reverence in your touch. He noted how your fingertips could tremble against him, sometimes, and though he’d never pointed it out to you, he always took your hand and kissed your fingers, hoping that you would feel his gratitude. You were so relentless that he found it increasingly easy to believe you. 

But it was those moments when you were half-asleep and took shelter in his arms like he could protect you from your own mind, that he understood the depths of your adoration. You didn’t just say things to him that you thought he wanted—or needed—to hear. When you whimpered and pressed your face against him, or wrapped your arms around him, you showed him that not only did you believe what you said, you thought he could be trusted.

It hadn’t happened until he was locked away in your apartment with you, but when he woke up from those nightmares in which he was falling, he began to feel a sense of relief. Life with you felt so idyllic that he was no longer waking from one nightmare into another. If he hadn’t woken you, he would turn to face you and study your face in the darkness. He loved the peace that he so often found there. You were mortal, frail and delicate, and yet you could sleep so peacefully beside the likes of him. It reminded him that he was no longer hurtling through space. He was not the same man who had allowed himself to fall away from his home and his family. He was not the same man who had been hurt, terribly hurt, over and over again until he finally bent to another’s will. He was not the same man who had hurt many people just to make his own pain stop. He was made up of all of these men, of course: they formed the base layer of his existence today, but he was not _merely_ them. He was also someone who could be trusted. Who _would_ be trusted. 

You could stop touching him tomorrow, stop telling him all your favorite things about him, perhaps even stop looking at him altogether, but it would still be enough, the way you curled against him in the darkness. He reached out to stroke your cheek, and you sighed. You pressed yourself into his touch like you couldn’t get enough, and you weren’t even awake to _know_ to do it. When he woke from the dreams in which he was falling, he didn’t need to hunch over the side of the bed or get up to stalk through your home to get himself back under control. At the end of those falling dreams, he woke up beside you, the one who at once grounded him and lifted him higher than he’d ever been before, and that was enough.

He still dreamed of falling. But, more often, he dreamed of you. 

And it was good.


End file.
